Yue Chinese

This article covers all Yue dialects. For the dialect spoken in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Macau, see Canton dialect.

Yue / Cantonese
Traditional Chinese	粵語
Simplified Chinese	粤语
Jyutping	Jyut6 jyu5
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yuè Yǔ Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Yuht Yúh Jyutping Jyut6 jyu5
Commonly known as
Traditional Chinese	廣東話
Simplified Chinese	广东话
Jyutping	Gwong2 dung1 waa6
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Guǎngdōng Huà Gan Romanization Guong3 dung1 ua5 Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Gwong2 dung1 waa6 Southern Min Hokkien POJ Kńg-tang-ōe

Yue
粵語/粤语 廣東話/广东话
Native to	People's Republic of China; and countries with overseas Chinese originating from Cantonese-speaking parts of China
Region	the Pearl River Delta (central Guangdong; Hong Kong, Macau); the eastern and southern Guangxi; parts of Hainan; Malaysia; United Kingdom; Vancouver; Toronto; San Francisco, New York City, Honolulu
Native speakers	71 million
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Yue
Writing system	Traditional Chinese
Official status
Official language in	Hong Kong and Macau (de facto; even though officially referred to as "Chinese"; Cantonese and occasionally Mandarin are used in government). Recognised regional language in Suriname.
Language codes
ISO 639-1	zh
ISO 639-2	chi (B) zho (T)
ISO 639-3	yue

Yue (粵, Cantonese Jyut6 jyu5 / Yuht Yúh, Mandarin Yuè Yǔ) is a primary branch of Chinese comprising a number of dialects spoken in the South of China mainly in the provinces of Guandong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau and in various overseas communities. The dialect of Canton, Hong Kong and Macau is the Yue dialect commonly known as Cantonese to English speakers.

The issue of whether Yue should be regarded as a language in its own right or as a dialect of a Chinese language depends on conceptions of what a language is. Like the other primary branches of Chinese, Yue is considered to be a dialect of a single Chinese language for ethnic and cultural reasons, but is also considered a language in its own right because it is mutually unintelligible with other varieties of Chinese.

The exact number of Yue speakers is unknown due to a lack of statistics and census data. The areas with the highest concentration of speakers are Guangdong and parts of Guangxi in southern mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau; with Cantonese- and Taishanese-speaking minorities in Southeast Asia, Canada, and the United States.

Names

The prototypical use of the name "Cantonese" is for the Canton (Guangzhou) dialect of Yue, but it is commonly used for Yue as a whole. To avoid confusion, academic texts may call the primary branch of Chinese Yue, following the Mandarin pinyin spelling, and either restrict "Cantonese" to its common usage as the dialect of Canton (Guangzhou), or avoid the term "Cantonese" altogether and distinguish Yue from Canton or Guangzhou dialect. People of Hong Kong, Macau and Cantonese immigrants abroad usually call the language Gwongdung Waa, "speech of Guangdong," though this is ambiguous as it implies that other languages or dialects in Guangdong such as Hakka and Teochew (which are not Cantonese) are included, and that the Cantonese spoken in Guangxi is not included. People of Guangdong and Guangxi do not use the term Gwongdung Waa, but call it Baak Waa (白話) "plain speech" or 粵語 "Yue language".

History

Relation to Classical Chinese

Since the pronunciation of all modern varieties of Chinese are different from Old Chinese or other forms of historical Chinese (such as Middle Chinese), characters that once rhymed in poetry may no longer (e.g. rhyming occurring sometimes in Min, Yue, and rarely in Mandarin, or vice versa). Poetry and other rhyme-based writing thus becomes less coherent than the original reading must have been. However, some modern Chinese dialects have certain phonological characteristics that are closer to the older pronunciations than others, as shown by the preservation of certain rhyme structures (平仄). Some believe wenyan literature, especially poetry, sounds better when read in certain dialects believed to be closer to older pronunciations, such as Yue or Southern Min, or the Wenzhou dialect.

Qin and Han

In ancient China, Guangdong was called Nanyue, and very few Han people lived there. Therefore, the Chinese language was not widely spoken there at that time. However, in the Qin Dynasty Chinese troops moved south and conquered the Baiyue territories, and thousands of Han people began settling in the Lingnan area. This migration led to the Chinese language being spoken in the Lingnan area. After Zhào Tuó was made the Duke of Nanyue by the Qin Dynasty and given authority over the Nanyue region, many Han people entered the area and lived together with the Nanyue population, consequently affecting the livelihood of the Nanyue people as well as stimulating the spread of the Chinese language. Although Han Chinese settlements and their influences soon dominated, some indigenous Nanyue population did not escape from the region. Today, the degree of interaction between Han Chinese and the indigenous population remains vague due to the lack of historical records.

Sui

In the Sui Dynasty, Zhongyuan was in a period of war and discontent, and many people moved southwards to avoid war, forming the first mass migration of Han people into the South. As the population in the Lingnan area dramatically rose, the Chinese language in the south developed significantly. Thus, the Cantonese language began to develop more significant differences with central Chinese.

Tang

As the Han population in the Guangdong area continued to rise during the Tang Dynasty, some indigenous people living in the south had been culturally assimilated by the Han population, while others moved to other regions (such as Guangxi), developing their own dialects. At the time, Cantonese was affected by central Chinese and became more standardized, but it further developed a more independent language structure, vocabulary, and grammar.

Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing

In the Song Dynasty, the differences between central Chinese and Cantonese became more significant, and the languages became more independent of one another. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Cantonese evolved still further, developing its own characteristics.

Mid to Late Qing

In the late Qing, the dynasty had gone through a period of maritime ban under the Hai jin. Guangzhou remained one of the few cities that allowed trading with foreign countries, since the trade chamber of commerce was established there. Therefore, some foreigners learned Cantonese and some Imperial government officials spoke Cantonese, making the language very popular in Cantonese-speaking Guangzhou. Also, the European control of Macau and Hong Kong had increased the exposure of Cantonese to the world.

20th century

In the Cantonese-speaking region of mainland China, Mandarin is used for official functions in recent years, while Cantonese is used in daily life.

In Hong Kong, Cantonese is the dominant language and is used everywhere, including education, the government, media and business dealings.

Nowadays, Mandarin being the medium of education on the mainland, many youngsters in the Cantonese speaking region in mainland China do not know specific historical and scientific vocabularies in Cantonese but do know social, cultural, entertainment, commercial, trading, and all other vocabularies. Cantonese is widely spoken and learned by overseas Chinese of Guangdong and Hong Kong origin.

The popularity of Cantonese-language media and entertainment from Hong Kong has led to a wide and frequent exposure of Cantonese to large portions of China and the rest of Asia. Cantopop and the Hong Kong film industry are prominent examples of modern Cantonese language media.

Varieties

A map of the main groups of Cantonese dialects in China and Vietnam.

Yue

Yuehai     Canton dialect (Guangfu)  Standard Cantonese Hong Kong Cantonese Vietnamese Cantonese (Hoa dialect) Danjia dialect  Sanyi (Nanpanshun)  Nanhai dialect Jiujiang dialect Xiqiao dialect Panyu dialect Shunde dialect  Zhongshan  Shiqi dialect  Guanbao  Dongguan dialect Bao'an (Weitou) dialect  Siyi (Seiyap)  Taishanese Siqian dialect  Luoguang dialect   Gaoyang  Gaozhou dialect Yangjiang dialect  Wuchuan dialect   Yongxun (Jungcam)  Nanning dialect Yongning dialect  Goulou (Ngaulau)  Guilin dialect  Qinlian (Jamlim)  Qinzhou dialect Lianzhou dialect  Hainan (Hai)  Danzhouhua Mai dialect ? Pinghua (Ping)  Guibei dialect Guinan dialect

The Yue language includes several dialects, some of which are only partially mutually intelligible. In the classification of J.M. Campbell, they are:

• Cantonese proper, Guangfu ([廣府粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)) or Yuehai ([粵海粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), which includes the language of Guangzhou and the surrounding areas of Zhongshan, Wuzhou, and Foshan, as well as Hong Kong and Macau;
• Sìyì ([四邑粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) Seiyap), exemplified by the Taishan dialect ([台山粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), also known as Taishanese, which was ubiquitous in American Chinatowns before ca 1970;
• Gaoyang ([高陽粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), spoken in Yangjiang;
• Wuhua ([吳化粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) Ngfaa), spoken mainly in western Guangdong;
• Goulou ([勾漏粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) Ngaulau), spoken in western Guangdong and eastern Guangxi, which includes the dialect of Yulin, Guangxi;
• Yongxun ([邕潯粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) Jungcam), spoken mainly in Guangxi and its capital Nanning;
• Qinlian ([欽廉粵語] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help) Jamlim), spoken in southern Guangxi, which includes the Beihai dialect;
• Danzhou ([儋州話] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), which includes the dialect of Changjiang
• Haihua ([海話] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), the dialect of Lianjiang

Formerly Pinghua ([廣西平話] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)), spoken in central Guangxi, was considered Yue, but it was designated a separate primary branch of Chinese by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the 1980s, a classification generally followed in the west.

The Canton/Guangzhou dialect of Yuehai is the prestige dialect and social standard of Yue, and historically the word "Cantonese" has referred specifically to this dialect.

Standard Mandarin is the medium of instruction in the state education system in Mainland China but in Chinese schools in Hong Kong and Macau, Yue is the oral language of instruction. It is used extensively in Yue-speaking households, Yue-language media (Hong Kong films, television serials, and Cantopop), isolation from the other regions of China, local identity, and the non-Mandarin speaking Yue diaspora in Hong Kong and abroad give the language a unique identity. Most wuxia 武俠 films from Canton are filmed originally in Yue and then dubbed or subtitled in Mandarin, English, or both.

Canton dialect

Main article: Canton dialect

The Canton–Hong Kong dialect is the prestige dialect of Guangdong province, and the de facto official language of Hong Kong. It is the most widely spoken dialect of Yue, spoken in Canton (Guangzhou), Hong Kong, and Macau, and is the lingua franca of not only Guangdong province, but of overseas Cantonese emigrants, though in many areas abroad it is numerically second to the Taishanese dialect of Yue. It forms the basis of Standard Cantonese.

Phonology

See Canton dialect and Taishanese for a discussion of the sounds of those dialects.

Yue development and usage

The area coloured in red shows the Cantonese-speaking region in areas claimed by the People's Republic of China.

Officially Standard Mandarin (Putonghua 普通話 or guoyu 國語) is the standard language of mainland China and Taiwan and is taught nearly universally as a supplement to local languages such as Cantonese in Guangdong. Yue is the de facto official language of Hong Kong (along with English) and Macau (along with Portuguese), though legally the official language is just "Chinese". Yue is also one of the main languages in many overseas Chinese communities including Australia, Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. Many of these emigrants and/or their ancestors originated from Guangdong. In addition, these immigrant communities formed before the widespread use of Mandarin, or they are from Hong Kong where Mandarin is not commonly used. The prestige dialect of Yue is the Guangzhou dialect. In Hong Kong, colloquial Cantonese often incorporates English words due to historical British influences.

In some ways, Yue is a more conservative language than Mandarin, and in other ways it is not. For example, Yue has retained consonant endings from older varieties of Chinese that have been lost in Mandarin, and also retains more tones than Mandarin, but it has merged some vowels, and especially consonants, from older varieties of Chinese.

The Taishan dialect, which in the U.S. nowadays is heard mostly spoken by Chinese actors in old American TV shows and movies (e.g. Hop Sing on Bonanza), is more conservative than Cantonese. It has preserved the initial /n/ sound of words, whereas many post-World War II-born Hong Kong Cantonese speakers have changed this to an /l/ sound ("ngàuh lām" instead of "ngàuh nām" for "beef brisket" [牛腩] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)) and more recently drop the "ng-" initial (so that it changes further to "àuh lām"); this seems to have arisen from some kind of street affectation as opposed to systematic phonological change. The common word for "who" in Taishan is "sŭe" ([誰] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help)), which is the same character used in classical Chinese, whereas Cantonese uses the unrelated word "bīngo" ([邊個] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hant (help)), meaning which one.

Yue sounds quite different from Mandarin, mainly because it has a different set of syllables. The rules for syllable formation are different; for example, there are syllables ending in non-nasal consonants (e.g. "lak"). It also has different tones and more of them than Mandarin. Canton dialect is generally considered to have 6 tones, as reflected in most romanization schemes such as Jyutping, Yale, Standard Cantonese Pinyin. According to other analyses, the number of tones may also be 7 or 8. The choice mainly depends on whether a traditional distinction between a high-level and a high-falling tone is observed; the two tones in question have largely merged into a single, high-level tone, especially in Hong Kong Cantonese, which has tended to simplify traditional Chinese tones. Many (especially older) descriptions of the Cantonese sound system record a higher number of tones, 9. However, the extra tones differ only in that they end in p, t, or k; otherwise they can be modeled identically.

Yue preserves many syllable-final sounds that Mandarin has lost or merged. For example, the characters 裔, 屹, 藝, 憶, 譯, 懿, 誼, 肄, 翳, 邑, and 佚 are all pronounced "yì" in Mandarin, but they are all different in Yue (Cantonese jeoih, ngaht, ngaih/ngaaih, yìk, yihk, yi, yìh, yih, ai, yap, and yaht, respectively). It should be noted that 艾 in Mandarin is commonly pronounced as ài, and is almost always used in transliteration, family names, and nicknames, as it carries no meaning by itself. Like Hakka and Min Nan, Yue has preserved the final consonants [-m, -n, -ŋ -p, -t, -k] from Middle Chinese, while the Mandarin final consonants have been reduced to [-n, -ŋ]. But unlike any other modern Chinese dialects, the final consonants of Yue match those of Middle Chinese with very few exceptions. For example, lacking the syllable-final sound "m"; the final "m" and final "n" from older varieties of Chinese have merged into "n" in Mandarin, e.g. Cantonese "taahm" (譚) and "tàahn" (壇) versus Mandarin tán; "yìhm" (鹽) and "yìhn" (言) versus Mandarin yán; "tìm" (添) and "tìn" (天) versus Mandarin tiān; "hùhm" (含) and "hòhn" (寒) versus Mandarin hán. The examples are too numerous to list. Furthermore, nasals can be independent syllables in Yue words, e.g. Cantonese "ńgh" (五) "five", and "m̀h" (唔) "not".

Differences also arise from Mandarin's relatively recent sound changes. One change, for example, palatalized [kʲ] with [tsʲ] to [tɕ], and is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as Peking (Beijing), Kiangsi (Jiangxi), and Fukien (Fujian). This distinction is still preserved in Yue. For example, 晶, 精, 經 and 京 are all pronounced as "jīng" in Mandarin, but in Yue, the first pair is pronounced "jīng", and the second pair "gīng".

A more drastic example, displaying both the loss of coda plosives and the palatization of onset consonants, is the character (學), pronounced *ɣæwk in Middle Chinese. Its modern pronunciations in Yue, Hakka, Hokkien, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese are "hohk", "hók" (pinjim), "ha̍k" (Pe̍h-ōe-jī), học (although a Sino-Vietnamese word, it is used in daily vocabulary), 학 hak (Sino-Korean), and gaku (Sino-Japanese), respectively, while the pronunciation in Mandarin is xué [ɕɥɛ̌].

However, the Mandarin vowel system is somewhat more conservative than that of Yue, or at least the Cantonese dialect of Yue, in that many diphthongs preserved in Mandarin have merged or been lost in Yue. Also, Mandarin makes a three-way distinction among alveolar, alveolo-palatal, and retroflex fricative consonants, distinctions that are not made by modern Cantonese. For example, jiang (將) and zhang (張) are two distinct syllables in Mandarin or old Yue, but in modern Cantonese Yue they have the same sound, "jeung1". The loss of distinction between the alveolar and the alveolopalatal sibilants in Cantonese occurred in the mid-19th centuries and was documented in many Cantonese dictionaries and pronunciation guides published prior to the 1950s. A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect by Williams (1856), writes: “The initials "ch" and "ts" are constantly confounded, and some persons are absolutely unable to detect the difference, more frequently calling the words under "ts" as "ch", than contrariwise.” A Pocket Dictionary of Cantonese by Cowles (1914) adds: “s initial may be heard for sh initial and vice versa.”

There are clear sound correspondences in the tones. For example, a fourth-tone (low falling tone) word in Yue is usually second tone (rising tone) in Mandarin. This can be partly explained by their common descent from Middle Chinese (spoken), still with its different dialects. One way of counting tones gives Cantonese nine tones, Mandarin four, and Middle Chinese eight. Within this system, Mandarin merged the so-called "yin" and "yang" tones except for the Ping (平, flat) category, while Yue not only preserved these, but split one of them into two over time. Also, within this system, Yue is the only Chinese language known to have split a tone, rather than merge two or more of them, since the time of Late Middle Chinese.

Use outside China

Historically, the majority of the overseas Chinese have originated from just two provinces; Fujian and Guangdong. This has resulted in the overseas Chinese having a far higher proportion of Fujian and Guangdong languages/dialect speakers than Chinese speakers in China as a whole. More recent emigration from Fujian and Hong Kong have continued this trend.

The largest number of Cantonese speakers outside mainland China and Hong Kong are in south east Asia; however, speakers of Min dialects are predominate among the overseas Chinese in south east Asia. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia is also known to have borrowed substantially from Malay and other languages.

United Kingdom

The majority of Cantonese speakers in the UK have origins from the former British colony of Hong Kong and speak the Canton/Hong Kong dialect, although many are in fact from Hakka-speaking families and are bilingual in Hakka. There are also Cantonese speakers from south east Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, as well as from Guangdong in China itself. Today an estimated 300,000 British people have Cantonese as a mother tongue, this represents 0.5% of the total UK population and 1% of the total overseas Cantonese speakers

United States

For the last 150 years, Guangdong Province has been the place of origin of most Chinese emigrants to western countries; one coastal county, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or sei yap dialect of Cantonese is spoken), alone may have been the home to more than 60% of Chinese immigrants to the US before 1965. As a result, Guangdong dialects such as sei yap (the dialects of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping and Xinhui Districts) and what is now called mainstream Cantonese (with a heavy Hong Kong influence) have been the major Cantonese dialects spoken abroad, particularly in the USA.

The Taishan dialect, one of the sei yap or siyi ([四邑] Error: {{Lang}}: unrecognized language tag: zh-yue-Hani (help)) dialects that come from Guangdong counties that were the origin of the majority of Exclusion-era Guangdong Chinese emigrants to the USA, continues to be spoken both by recent immigrants from Taishan and even by third-generation Chinese Americans of Taishan ancestry alike.

The dialect of Zhongshan in Pearl River Delta is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, and some in San Francisco and in the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke, California); it is much closer to Canton dialect than Taishanese, but has "flatter" tones in pronunciation than Cantonese. Cantonese is the third most widely spoken non-English language in the United States. Many institutes of higher education, such as Stanford, Duke, and Yale, have Cantonese programs. The currently most popular romanization for learning Cantonese in the United States is Yale Romanization.

The dialectal situation is now changing in the United States; recent Chinese emigrants originate from many different areas including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Recent immigrants from mainland China and Taiwan in the U.S. all speak Standard Mandarin (putonghua/guoyu), with varying degrees of fluency, and their native local language/dialect, such as Min (Hokkien and other Fujian dialects), Wu, Mandarin, Cantonese etc. As a result Standard Mandarin is increasingly becoming more common as the Chinese lingua franca among overseas Chinese.

See also

• Standard Cantonese
• Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation
• Standard Cantonese Pinyin
• Jyutping (LSHK)
• Yale Romanization#Cantonese
• Written Cantonese
• Cantonese grammar
• Written Chinese
• Chinese input methods for computers

External links

• Free Intermediate and Advanced Learning MP3
• Classification of Cantonese Dialects
• Profile and Linguistic Map of Cantonese
• a keyboard for typing chinese characters for firefox